spamming by the creator of popular WordPress
from AntBlog701

spamming by the creator of popular WordPress

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of the popular open source weblog software Wordpress has admitted to gaming the Google Adwords programme by hosting tens of thousands of “articles” that contain hidden, paid-for keywords.

Mullenweg hosted at least 160,000 pieces of “content” on his site wordpress.org which use a cloaking technique to hide keywords such as “asbestos”, “debit consolidation” and “mortgages”. Mullenweg was paid a flat fee by Hot Nacho Inc. (from The Register)

Andrew Baio found at least 168,000 articles on WordPress website. Andrew Baio asked Matt Mullenweg, the response:

Matt said he was skeptical at first, but the money is helping to cover his costs and hire their first employee. “The /articles thing isn't something I want to do long term,” he said, “but if it can help bootstrap something nice for the community, I'm willing to let it run for a little while.”

He added that if the user community didn't like it, he'd end the program. “Everything we do is user driven. If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don't want it. At the same time, if you think people don't care it provides some flexibility in setting up the foundation.”(from Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam)

WordPress is spamming secretly. What's the problem with that? A huge number of so-called geeks dumped Movable Type and switched to WordPress, when Six Apart decided to change their licensing scheme on the popular blog software, Movable Type. Mark Pilgrim's article provides some popular reasons why many people dumping MovableType.

The problems?

• WordPress was one of the major blog software that support anti-spam, and WordPress is spamming (or supporting spam) secretly.
  
• WordPress' official website had Google's PageRank 10/10, thanks to it's popularity and the requirement in license (link back to WordPress website)
  
• People trusted WordPress for its license and open-source, especially those open-source supporters.
  
• The ethical question, an open-source project that secretly generating money 1) by gaming the search engines; 2) without clear disclosure to its users (supporters).
  
• What WordPress.org did was a huge link farm with its high PageRank.

Matt Mullenweg posted a response, he admitted but did not explain much in my honest opinion.

Sadly it seems like Matt Mullenweg has demeaned his own credibility. I don't know how long would that be required to restore his credibility. There's always something about ethics.

Side note: As for the Mark Pilgrim's reasons, even thought he keeps repeating that was not due to licensing issue (money), but in my opinion, the entire article is still about money.

> the detail recorded by Andrew Baio, Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam (waxy.org)
> TheRegister: Blog star 'fesses up to payola spam scam
> Slashdot: Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming